A monthly-ish roundup of news from resource description groups and committees in Australia and overseas. To submit an item for the next Digest, use our contact form.

MAC (MARC Advisory Committee)

The MARC Advisory Committee (MAC) is ‘a forum for broad and open discussion of standards used for representation of bibliographic data in machine-readable form’. The National Library of Australia has a seat on this committee. 

At MAC’s June meeting, and as flagged at ACORD’s earlier June meeting, NLA staff members teamed with AIATSIS and strongly advocated against the proposed changes to the 041 field outlined in Discussion Paper 2025-DP14, which would have impacted Australia’s ability to implement AUSTLANG language codes. The advocacy was successful, with the paper’s authors from OCLC agreeing to reconsider their approach.

ORDAC (Oceania RDA Committee)

The Oceania RDA Committee (ORDAC) represents Oceania on the RDA Steering Committee and proposes revisions to the RDA standard in line with Oceania member needs. ACORD is represented on this committee by Brad Chugg, Renate Beilharz and Catherine Barnes.

The RDA Steering Committee are looking for a Wider Community Engagement Officer, who is responsible for ‘engaging with and representing members of the RDA cataloguing community whose geographic locations are not sited in Regions with regional RDA committees’. EOIs close 30th July.

TSAC (Trove Strategic Advisory Committee)

The Trove Strategic Advisory Committee (TSAC) is ‘the principal body through which the National Library seeks strategic input from Trove Partners’. ACORD is indirectly represented on this committee by Nicole Hunt. 

A one-page summary from TSAC’s May meeting is now available. Of note to ACORD members is Trove’s continuing work on the future of Australian authority data and identity management. 

DDC EPC (Dewey Editorial Policy Committee) 

The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) has an international Editorial Policy Committee that works with the DDC Editor to propose improvements to the standard. ACORD is represented on this committee by Melissa Parent.

Exhibits for EPC 146 July 2025 are now available on their google drive. Of note is exhibit 146-T6.1, outlining the DDC’s revised approach to recording names of Indigenous peoples of the Americas in the Relative Index (NB this is not visible in a DDC number itself).

Other

Need to convince your manager that good metadata is a good investment? The ALA SAC Devaluation of Cataloging Working Group have published their outputs in the ALA repository, including a set of talking points, a slide deck, and two zines.

Wellington City Libraries in Pōneke, Aotearoa / Wellington, New Zealand are trialling a new classification system based on Māori atua (deities). The April 2025 issue of Catapult, the newsletter of LIANZA’s CatSIG, includes an in-depth article on the new arrangement by Shane Caldwell (pp. 9-14).